Richard Crowson

Well, hello there, fellow Kansas heartlanders…I was just sitting here gulping espresso and trying my darnedest to (big yawn) stay awake and alert. After all, our pulse rate here in the heart of Kansas was supposed to be zipping along at warp speed by now. Gov. Sam Brownback’s great trickle-down economics experiment, in which he gave a massive tax cut to the rich and eliminated business taxes, was supposed to have us all buzzing around like manic hummingbirds on sugar water.

Were you as shocked and appalled as I was at the outrageous treatment of our own Governor Brownback by the audacious WSU and KU fans in Omaha? I could not believe my ears when I heard those boos aimed at this fine man. After all he’s done for the state of Kansas, this is his reward??? They boo a man who has saved our state from the ravages of economic recovery? A man who had the foresight to dam up Kansas revenue streams, causing a 25% reduction in income tax collections last year? At a time...

What we got to do, is we got to nip Commonism in the bud. And by “Commonism” what I mean is Common Core. Common Core is Commonism. We didn’t have no Commonism when me and all them other Kansans got our learning. And just look at what a bang-up job we done! Our smartness done made this state we got here into a sort of compost pile that attracts the bestest and the most brightest. Look no further than Topeka to see what sort of fine, razor-sharp minds this here state done elevated to the top....

There’s a creeping, ghoulish specter out there haunting the state of Kansas this Halloween. The green, misty tentacles of its hot, fetid breath are curling and twining around us and even entering the very ears of Kansans everywhere. It’s called dark money. The secretive spending by special interest groups during this election season has led to Kansas being the state with the “highest percentage of TV ads paid for by secretive outside money,” according to a recent story in the Wichita Eagle....

It strikes me that among the ethereal mysteries of our planet, there are some that it would be deeply challenging to explain to a visitor from another world. Some of these pleasures are things like music, art and lightning bugs. “Earth is really pretty cool,” I’d say. “We’ve got these sounds that we call 'music' that alter our state of mind. Then we have images that people create by combining colors in such a way that simply looking at them can transport us to another place. We call that 'art...

You know that soccer mom who jogs by your house every morning? The other day she went right up to your son’s third grade teacher and stripped her naked of the due process rights she’s had for the last 57 years here in Kansas. And that guy who was smiling and joking with me in the checkout line at the grocery last Saturday? He lit a firebomb, taped a tax credit for private school supporters on it, and flung it through the window of a first grade classroom in the wee hours of Sunday morning. If...